French youths open fire on police

A group of youths watch as firefighters extinguish burning vehicles during disturbances in the Paris suburb of Aulnay sur Bois. Photograph: Victor Tonelli/Reuters

French youths fired at police and burned over 300 cars last night as towns around Paris experienced their worst night of violence in a week of urban unrest.

The French prime minister, Dominique de Villepin, was involved in a series of crisis meetings today following the clashes between police and immigrant groups in at least 10 poor suburbs, during which youths torched car dealerships, public buses and a school.

Four shots were fired at police and fire officers in four different towns without causing any injuries, said Jean-Francois Cordet, the senior government official for the troubled Seine-Saint-Denis region north of Paris, where the week of violence has been concentrated.

Protestors set fire to 315 cars in the Paris area overnight, half of them in Seine-Saint-Denis, where nine people were injured, officials said.

The violence has once more trained a spotlight on the poverty and lawlessness of France's rundown big-city suburbs and raises questions about an immigration policy that has, in effect, created sink ghettos for mainly African minorities who suffer from discrimination in housing, education and jobs.

In the north-eastern suburb of Aulnay-sous-Bois, gangs of youths set fire to a Renault car dealership and incinerated at least a dozen cars, a supermarket and a local gymnasium.

In nearby La Courneuve, two shots were fired at riot police, Mr Cordet said. A third shot targeted firefighters in Noisy-le-Sec, and a forth was aimed at a fire crew in Saint-Denis, home to the Stade de France stadium.

Bands of youths forced a team of France-2 television reporters out of their car in the suburb of Le Blanc Mesnil, then flipped the vehicle and set it on fire.

Unrest spilled over to public housing projects in the area, where police engaged in a cat-and-mouse game with youths, who would break car windows and toss petrol-bombs inside before running away.

Today, France's government was in crisis mode with Mr de Villepin calling a string of emergency meetings with government officials throughout the day.

One was a working lunch with the interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, who has been accused of inflaming the crisis with his tough talk and police tactics. Mr Sarkozy has called troublemakers "scum" and vowed to "clean out" troubled suburbs, language that some say further alienated their residents.

The unrest was triggered by last Thursday's accidental death in Clichy-sous-Bois, five miles from Aulnay, of two African teenagers who were electrocuted while hiding in a power substation from what they believed, apparently wrongly, was police pursuit. An interior ministry official described the clashes as "more like sporadic harassment, lightweight hit-and-run urban guerrilla fighting, than head-to-head confrontation". Small, highly mobile groups of up to a dozen youths emerge, hurl stones or petrol bombs, and disperse. "It's hard to contain," the official said.

The minister of social cohesion, Jean-Louis Borloo, said the government had to react "firmly" but added that France must also acknowledge its failure to deal with anger simmering in poor suburbs for decades.

"We cannot hide the truth: that for 30 years we have not done enough," he told France-2 television.